Growing Chinese programmatic market 'unique'

TubeMogul is pushing into the Chinese video market, looking to take advantage of growing programmatic ad tech adoption.

The Chinese market is expected to spend nearly $9.3 billion in 2016 on programmatic advertising, according to eMarketer. Much of that spending will be on mobile devices, which have achieved high penetration in the massive market, estimated to be nearly 87%. And, nearly 86% of all mobile phones are smartphones, according to Statista. China has been the world’s largest smartphone market since 2012, and counts more than 1.3 billion users as of Q2 2016.

Calling China “a unique market,” as it has more than half of media inventory is concentrated on several major video platforms, TubeMogul MD of Greater China Jeffery Zheng told industry publication Marketing that, “Advertisers need a unified platform where they can establish a stable and efficient co-operation with all these platforms at the same time to buy a fixed media placement and exposure at a fixed price as well as getting the integrated real-time result.”

Zheng said the Chinese market increasingly is looking toward programmatic direct buy, and is moving away from its near total commitment to real-time bidding (RTB).

“The China market is really fragmented and there are so many third-party agencies,” Zheng said.

As elsewhere across the globe, the successful adoption of programmatic in China will rely on educating advertisers, publishers and agencies.

Sixty percent of U.S. digital video ad spending likely will occur through programmatic channels this year, an increase of nearly 54% from a year ago, but that number could be significantly larger if more video ad inventory was available.

Indonesia and Malaysia are among the leaders when it comes to programmatic ad spending growth in the Asia Pacific region, and a new study says APAC’s six largest markets are expected to see a surge in spending over the next several years.